The urge to be grateful, he said, is not a function of his faith. It’s not “the Gospel tells us” and therefore we give thanks. It is what he has always felt: grateful to be alive. “And so that act, that impulse to be grateful, wants an object. That object I call God.
What punishments of God are not gifts?

Beautiful-simple-complexity. The universe is extremely complicated and we cannot comprehend all of it. When we reduce that complexity to invented concepts we start to be able to see and understand such discrete concepts in their entirety. Tiling is one such dramatically simplified concept that is just on the edge of our human ability to understand its complexity. That is what reductionists do, try to break down reality into intelligible ideas. Of course you can also observe the universe from way up high, which is also beautiful, but in a very different way and scope. Intelligible vs unintelligible beauty.
unknowably complicated → knowingly complicated → knowingly simple → unknowably simple ↺Pentagon tiling – above are the only 15 ways we currently know of to tessellate pentagonsVoronoi diagramTruchet tiles

The question is whether civilization as we know it can survive a transformation from values laid down by a few (the elite) to a global auction offering different and often conflicting values and perceptions. With luck a kind of benign global civilization may emerge. The alternative is conflicts born out of values justifying violence and armed conflicts against those who think otherwise — the easy way.